Detroit Free Press Sports Writer

Like, how does he weigh the needs of the team against the comfort level of a player in a role he’s not all that familiar with?

Like Rick Porcello, pitching in relief with the bases-loaded in a tie game. Or like Jhonny Peralta, asked to roam the spacious leftfield of Comerica Park for the first time.

“I always cop out by saying in 1968, Mayo Smith took his centerfielder and played him at shortstop for the World Series,” the Tigers manager said. “And they won. So I guess that’s my answer.”

The centerfielder was Mickey Stanley.

And while the stakes are different now, and while Smith’s move might not have been his most bold of that 1968 Series — he let Mickey Lolich, with a .114 batting average that season, hit in the waning innings of Game 5, and his single started a game-winning rally — Leyland talked of the uncertainty Porcello was faced with in the ninth inning of Game 2.

“I brought Ricky in because he’s a sinkerball pitcher,” he said. “Trying to get a groundball at somebody, you figure if he hits it hard enough you could possibly go home to first and get the double play and get out of it.”

But A’s catcher Stephen Vogt, after seeing Porcello’s sink on the first two pitches, didn’t hit a groundball, but rather a game-winning single to left.

“Fortunately, I was able to get the ball in the air,” Vogt said.

He knew he was up fourth that inning and told himself, “You get up this inning, you have a chance to win this.”

After a pair of base hits, he had a good feeling the Tigers were going to walk Josh Reddick.

Leyland said: “We could have gone after Reddick and maybe tried to strike him out, but I just felt like we had the catcher hitting ...”

And the catcher was going to hit, A’s manager Bob Melvin said, no matter what, after his workman-like 10-pitch at-bat against Justin Verlander in the seventh inning.

“That was one of the toughest at-bats we’ve seen in the series,” Melvin said. “He was grinding in that last at-bat when he struck out and struck out a couple of times before that.

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“But he was involved in the game, he was in the flow of it ... no, he was going to hit.”

■ A-OK: Absent so far in the series has been righty reliever Jose Veras, who was acquired in July from the Astros.

Leyland said Veras is “100% healthy and very available,” but that he went with Al Alburquerque because he “has had kind of a hot hand.”

But, Leyland said, there is “absolutely nothing wrong” with Veras, and he expects him to pitch in the series.

■ STEALING SIGNS: “I wish we were stealing signs,” Melvin deadpanned, when asked about the A’s sign-stealing rumors from the series win in August.

“It didn’t happen in that series,” Melvin said. “We just had our best offensive series of the year.”

■ ON THIS DATE: Forty-five years ago, in a day game at Tiger Stadium, Game 5 of the 1968 World Series, Willie Horton threw out speedster Lou Brock at home plate in a series-changing play.

The Tigers, facing elimination, trailed by a run in the fifth inning. They scored three runs in the seventh, won 5-3, and took the final two games for the world championship.